9 ms·

Secretly Public Domain: Most books published in the US before 1964

286 points by BerislavLopac 7y ago

crazygringo 7y ago
Wow... is this authoritative? If true, this is worthy of an article in major news publications, no? And if legally sound, then should we expect Google Books to make these 80% of books fully available, as all books from 1923 and prior already are? Also... how are we only figuring this out now?
- philipkglass 7y ago
  As far as I can tell, Google Books has never tried to apply specific renewal information in determining what books can be shown in full. But HathiTrust gets the same books as Google Books and they do use such information. Try it if you find a book in this time range on Google Books that has limited visibility: https://www.hathitrust.org/ https://www.hathitrust.org/
- btrettel 7y ago
  I've had good luck getting Google to mark books as public domain, at least if they are government publications. Here's what I do: I click on the "Report an issue" link at the bottom, select "I have a question or feedback about a book", and fill out the form, selecting "I’d like to see the entire book, and I believe the book is in the public domain" as the reason. Doesn't work every time, but I'd guess it has worked over 90% of the time for me. Might work for other reasons too. I don't know at the moment, but I'll give it a shot at the next opportunity I have.
dwheeler 7y ago
(Edit: I misread the original claim, my fault. So I'm fixing the text here.) I think it's important to look at authoritative documents, especially since copyright duration is absurdly complicated. You can learn more about copyright duration in the US here: https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-duration.html https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-duration.html Circular 15a "Duration of Copyright" from the US Copyright Office ( https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ15a.pdf https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ15a.pdf ) says in heading "Automatic Renewal and Voluntary Registration" that: * "Mandatory Renewal Works originally copyrighted between January 1, 1950, and December 31, 1963. Copyrights in their first 28-year term on January 1, 1978, still had to be renewed to be protected for the second term. If a valid renewal registration was made at the proper time, the second term will last for 67 years. However, if renewal registration for these works was not made within the statutory time limits, a copyright originally secured between 1950 and 1963 expired on December 31 of its 28th year, and protection was lost permanently." * "Works originally copyrighted between January 1, 1964, and December 31, 1977. Congress amended the copyright law on June 26, 1992, to automatically renew the copyright in these works and to make renewal registration for them optional. Their copyright term is still divided between a 28-year original term and a 67-year renewal term, but a renewal registration is not required to secure the renewal copyright. The renewal vests on behalf of the appropriate renewal claimant upon renewal registration or, if there is no renewal registration, on December 31 of the 28th year." So there is a cutoff before 1964. However, it's not at all clear to me how many times the copyright holders didn't renew their copyrights. I would be unsurprised if the big publishers did typically renew them. If a book was published in 1950 and it was renewed, then the copyright would continue until 2045 (1950+28+67). I've only listed 2 cases (just before & just after 1964), but there are actually many more cases and it's all quite complicated. I think copyright duration is grossly overlong, far in excess of what is needed to get people to create works.
- ealfert 7y ago
  I'm interpreting your quote as applying only to works first copyrighted after 1964. But, the poster is referring to works copyrighted before 1964.
- blatherard 7y ago
  > So there is a cutoff before 1964. However, it's not at all clear to me how many times the copyright holders didn't renew their copyrights. I would be unsurprised if the big publishers did typically renew them. That doesn't sound that surprising to me either, but I don't think that matters for the claim that most are PD now. My intuition would be that big publishers wouldn't be responsible for a large percentage of the published titles in that time period. Certainly, from the standpoint of units sold they would be, but not distinct works. There's a lot more niche, technical, academic, low-end, etc works even though most people consume the mass-market popular stuff. I would expect that all those long-tail things to be the ones that never got renewed, and to be in the majority as far as titles go.
mistrial9 7y ago
.. for some value of "most"
- kss238 7y ago
  The article says 80%
  - saalweachter 7y ago
    I would also keep mind Sturgeon's Law ("90% of everything is crud", first published 1957 in his book review column, interestingly enough). Most books are crap. Interchangeable crap; maybe you'd enjoy some of them or learn something, but you could pick at random from the interchangeable pile of crap and be equally entertained and educated. If you trawled that 80% of pre-1964 books, most of it would be crap, simply because most books are crap, whether they were published in 1964, 2014, or 1864. And more of it would be crap, because if you are differentially renewing copyrights on books in your catalogue, you are trying to renew the good stuff and forget the crap. That's not to say that good books didn't fall out of copyright, for a million reasons, but if you have five books you like from before 1964, and you go check the copyright status, don't be surprised if fewer than 4 are part of that 80%.
AdmiralAsshat 7y ago
I would be very surprised if this were true. I volunteer with standardebooks.org on getting books in the public domain transcribed, proofread, and typeset for modern e-readers. There are a swarm of books that we would like to upload but can't, due to unclear copyright status on them. This includes stuff that everyone and their mother has probably bought several times already, including the works of HP Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, etc. For most of these, we still follow the Mickey Mouse rule, and do not proceed until we are absolutely sure they're safe. Case in point, I've been thinking about transcribing The Worm Ouroboros[0] for some time, as it should be in the public domain even by conservative estimates, and yet I can't formally verify its copyright status, so I haven't yet. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Worm_Ouroboros https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Worm_Ouroboros
- johnhattan 7y ago
  It was published in 1922, and the author died in 1945. Seems like that book is PD by any measure. According to the article, it looks like Gutenberg adds a layer of "let a lawyer sign off on it", presumably to keep them from getting sued out of existence. Is that the case for Worm Ouroboros?
- toomuchtodo 7y ago
  It's been almost two decades since I've worked with Project Gutenberg and Distributed Proofreaders, but back then they had pro bono counsel who would provide opinions and clear works prior to publication. Does standardebooks.org not have the same?
  - AdmiralAsshat 7y ago
    Project is too small, from my understanding (I'm only a contributor, not a core team member). You can see from the contribution guidelines[0]: Ebooks that are not clearly in the U.S. public domain. If it’s not on Gutenberg, we’ll probably decline it. So we're basically piggybacking off of the copyright verification work we assume that PG has already done. This is one of the reasons I haven't started The Worm Ourboros yet--it's in Australia's Gutenberg archive, but not the US one. [0]https://standardebooks.org/contribute/accepted-ebooks https://standardebooks.org/contribute/accepted-ebooks
flycaliguy 7y ago
Can anybody tell me if the same laws cover illustrations in old books that cover the words?
- jandrese 7y ago
  As far as I know the copyright terms for illustrations are the same as the ones for the written word. However, you could theoretically have a situation where the artist renewed the copyright on the images but the author did not renew the copyright on the words, or vice versa.
blatherard 7y ago
The important point in this article is that the NYPL just recently digitized the relevant records, thereby making it possible to determine whether a copyright was renewed. The old rule of thumb (anything after 1923 is presumptively protected) was used because looking for the absence of a renewal in a multi-decade span of printed records just wasn't feasible. The linked post in the article is very detailed and has more background: https://www.nypl.org/blog/2019/05/31/us-copyright-history-1923-1964 https://www.nypl.org/blog/2019/05/31/us-copyright-history-19...
edgarvaldes 7y ago
I would love to have all the winners of the Hugo Awards(the first were given in 1953)
jandrese 7y ago
I wish we would bring back manual renewals for copyright. I get that publishers thought it was a hassle to have to do the work for stuff they had not published in decades and had no intention of ever reprinting, but that's kind of the point isn't it? Why is the government locking away works that the original rightsholders no longer care about? The copyright system is supposed to serve the common good, what common good is there from locking away works simply because the original owner lost interest in them? Or worse, when nobody knows who or where the original owner is.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- kbutler 7y ago
  Grant short-term copyright for any written works, but require registration and periodic renewal for longer duration, with increasing fees for subsequent renewals.
  - TomMarius 7y ago
    I would be in favor of continuously increasing percentage of revenue based tax, not some arbitrary fee.
    - jandrese 7y ago
      That's kind of hard to measure though. It would require a LOT of government auditing to catch cheaters. Like Hollywood movies would never have to pay to be renewed because they never make any net revenue.
- riffic 7y ago
  https://www.wikihow.com/Write-Your-Congressional-Representative https://www.wikihow.com/Write-Your-Congressional-Representat...
- pavon 7y ago
  I'm not a big fan of copyright renewals. There are two arguments I here in favor of them. 1) It allows orphaned works to enter the public domain sooner. 2) For works that are renewed, it provides information on who the copyright holder is and how they can be contacted. On the first point, I think that renewal is a poor proxy for determining which works are are orphaned or no longer have commercial value, instead just showing which copyright holders have the most diligent book keeping. Large number of published works will loose copyright protection just due to oversight. A simple mistake shouldn't result in disproportionate consequences (loss of decades of revenue). At the same time other works that are no longer available on the market will be prevented from entering public domain by companies that just renew everything. Furthermore, historically, the USPTO has done a poor job of keeping (and making accessible) records of which works were renewed, and which weren't. Anyone who wants to use an orphaned work has needed to prove a negative, which is difficult to do, so most assume that everything is still copyrighted to avoid liability anyway. Lastly, just because someone has registered a work (for renewal or otherwise) is not proof that they hold copyright on that work. People have spent decades trying to determine the rightful owner of a work so they can license it, even when it was registered. Instead, I think what we need is a process for the USPTO to grant third parties permission to use a work when a good faith effort has been made to determine and contact the copyright holder. In my view, this would involve involve paying of statutory license fees to the USPTO who will hold them in escrow. If the owner is eventually determined, they can claim the money, and if no one claims it after some time it goes to fund the endowment for the arts. This would allow the public access to orphaned and disputed works again, and would encourage registration without the strong consequences for forgetting. I would actually take this a step further and declare that all works are subject to statutory licensing for the second half of their copyright duration, not just orphaned works, and the above process would just be a fallback when the copyright holder can't be contacted. And of course, would shorten the copyright duration as well.
tzs 7y ago
Here is a very nice table listing pretty much every case under US copyright law [1]. For books first published in the US, here is what is now in the public domain. • Books published before 1924. • Books published from 1924 through 1977 without a copyright notice. • Books published from 1978 to early 1989 without a copyright notice and without a subsequent registration within 5 years. • Books published from 1924 through 1963 with copyright notice but whose copyright was not renewed. (This is the case for the books the article is talking about). • Books prepared by an officer or employee of the US government as part of the person's official duties. [1] https://copyright.cornell.edu/publicdomain https://copyright.cornell.edu/publicdomain
thepete2 7y ago
Why is there no netflix for books? Google already scanned most of the world's books. The only thing that would be scary is someone knowing what books I read when and where. (my usual privacy concerns ...)
- Bluecobra 7y ago
  There already is. Amazon has had Kindle Unlimited ($9.99/month) for quite some time for now.
  - coldtea 7y ago
    And of course there's O'Reilly's Safari subscription for programming/tech books...
- slg 7y ago
  There is. It is called the library. My local library has plenty of ebooks and audio books that I can borrow through both their website and their partners' websites like overdrive.com. And it doesn't even even cost you a monthly fee because it is already paid for by your tax dollars whether you use it or not.
  - readams 7y ago
    Though there are often long lines to wait for many books, because the licensing model is dumb.
- teddyh 7y ago
  A Netflix for books, you say? http://www.johnnywander.com/comic/a-netflix-for-books http://www.johnnywander.com/comic/a-netflix-for-books
- shmerl 7y ago
  Archive.org has digital borrowing concept. I don't like digital renting though. If you are paying, better just to buy DRM-free and keep your copy.
- 7y ago
acabal 7y ago
This is really awesome and I wasn't aware of it! For a lot of the pulp sci fi stuff on Project Gutenberg, it was just a handful of volunteers doing the copyright research and I think it was a big bottleneck. I remember thinking of getting involved in that research but it was far too complicated and time consuming. Making it machine-readable is a huge step to opening up the public domain!
shmerl 7y ago
> This is how Project Gutenberg is able to publish all these science fiction stories from the 50s and 60s. Interesting. I was wondering how Project Gutenberg put Robert Sheckley's stories on-line (and why only some and not all of them): https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/2960 https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/2960 It also highlights again, how crazy copyright term has become, and that it needs a serious rollback to sane levels.
sehugg 7y ago
Lots of TV shows before 1970 weren't renewed or had copyright notice errors, making them PD -- many of them on archive.org: https://infogalactic.com/info/List_of_TV_series_with_episodes_in_the_public_domain https://infogalactic.com/info/List_of_TV_series_with_episode...
tyingq 7y ago
This affects earlier versions of the Alcoholics Anonymous "Big Book", and I'd heard it was a sore point for them. http://silkworth.net/gsowatch/1939/uslaw.htm http://silkworth.net/gsowatch/1939/uslaw.htm
dfc 7y ago
> This only represents 10% of the 80%, but it's the ten percent most likely to be interesting, Does anyone have any insight into why the chosen 10% is the most likely to be interesting?

286 points by BerislavLopac 7y ago

Wow... is this authoritative? If true, this is worthy of an article in major news publications, no? And if legally sound, then should we expect Google Books to make these 80% of books fully available, as all books from 1923 and prior already are? Also... how are we only figuring this out now?

philipkglass 7y ago
As far as I can tell, Google Books has never tried to apply specific renewal information in determining what books can be shown in full. But HathiTrust gets the same books as Google Books and they do use such information. Try it if you find a book in this time range on Google Books that has limited visibility: https://www.hathitrust.org/ https://www.hathitrust.org/
btrettel 7y ago
I've had good luck getting Google to mark books as public domain, at least if they are government publications. Here's what I do: I click on the "Report an issue" link at the bottom, select "I have a question or feedback about a book", and fill out the form, selecting "I’d like to see the entire book, and I believe the book is in the public domain" as the reason. Doesn't work every time, but I'd guess it has worked over 90% of the time for me. Might work for other reasons too. I don't know at the moment, but I'll give it a shot at the next opportunity I have.

dwheeler 7y ago

(Edit: I misread the original claim, my fault. So I'm fixing the text here.) I think it's important to look at authoritative documents, especially since copyright duration is absurdly complicated. You can learn more about copyright duration in the US here: https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-duration.html https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-duration.html Circular 15a "Duration of Copyright" from the US Copyright Office ( https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ15a.pdf https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ15a.pdf ) says in heading "Automatic Renewal and Voluntary Registration" that: * "Mandatory Renewal Works originally copyrighted between January 1, 1950, and December 31, 1963. Copyrights in their first 28-year term on January 1, 1978, still had to be renewed to be protected for the second term. If a valid renewal registration was made at the proper time, the second term will last for 67 years. However, if renewal registration for these works was not made within the statutory time limits, a copyright originally secured between 1950 and 1963 expired on December 31 of its 28th year, and protection was lost permanently." * "Works originally copyrighted between January 1, 1964, and December 31, 1977. Congress amended the copyright law on June 26, 1992, to automatically renew the copyright in these works and to make renewal registration for them optional. Their copyright term is still divided between a 28-year original term and a 67-year renewal term, but a renewal registration is not required to secure the renewal copyright. The renewal vests on behalf of the appropriate renewal claimant upon renewal registration or, if there is no renewal registration, on December 31 of the 28th year." So there is a cutoff before 1964. However, it's not at all clear to me how many times the copyright holders didn't renew their copyrights. I would be unsurprised if the big publishers did typically renew them. If a book was published in 1950 and it was renewed, then the copyright would continue until 2045 (1950+28+67). I've only listed 2 cases (just before & just after 1964), but there are actually many more cases and it's all quite complicated. I think copyright duration is grossly overlong, far in excess of what is needed to get people to create works.

ealfert 7y ago
I'm interpreting your quote as applying only to works first copyrighted after 1964. But, the poster is referring to works copyrighted before 1964.
blatherard 7y ago
> So there is a cutoff before 1964. However, it's not at all clear to me how many times the copyright holders didn't renew their copyrights. I would be unsurprised if the big publishers did typically renew them. That doesn't sound that surprising to me either, but I don't think that matters for the claim that most are PD now. My intuition would be that big publishers wouldn't be responsible for a large percentage of the published titles in that time period. Certainly, from the standpoint of units sold they would be, but not distinct works. There's a lot more niche, technical, academic, low-end, etc works even though most people consume the mass-market popular stuff. I would expect that all those long-tail things to be the ones that never got renewed, and to be in the majority as far as titles go.

mistrial9 7y ago

.. for some value of "most"

kss238 7y ago
The article says 80%
- saalweachter 7y ago
  I would also keep mind Sturgeon's Law ("90% of everything is crud", first published 1957 in his book review column, interestingly enough). Most books are crap. Interchangeable crap; maybe you'd enjoy some of them or learn something, but you could pick at random from the interchangeable pile of crap and be equally entertained and educated. If you trawled that 80% of pre-1964 books, most of it would be crap, simply because most books are crap, whether they were published in 1964, 2014, or 1864. And more of it would be crap, because if you are differentially renewing copyrights on books in your catalogue, you are trying to renew the good stuff and forget the crap. That's not to say that good books didn't fall out of copyright, for a million reasons, but if you have five books you like from before 1964, and you go check the copyright status, don't be surprised if fewer than 4 are part of that 80%.

AdmiralAsshat 7y ago

I would be very surprised if this were true. I volunteer with standardebooks.org on getting books in the public domain transcribed, proofread, and typeset for modern e-readers. There are a swarm of books that we would like to upload but can't, due to unclear copyright status on them. This includes stuff that everyone and their mother has probably bought several times already, including the works of HP Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, etc. For most of these, we still follow the Mickey Mouse rule, and do not proceed until we are absolutely sure they're safe. Case in point, I've been thinking about transcribing The Worm Ouroboros[0] for some time, as it should be in the public domain even by conservative estimates, and yet I can't formally verify its copyright status, so I haven't yet. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Worm_Ouroboros https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Worm_Ouroboros

johnhattan 7y ago
It was published in 1922, and the author died in 1945. Seems like that book is PD by any measure. According to the article, it looks like Gutenberg adds a layer of "let a lawyer sign off on it", presumably to keep them from getting sued out of existence. Is that the case for Worm Ouroboros?
toomuchtodo 7y ago
It's been almost two decades since I've worked with Project Gutenberg and Distributed Proofreaders, but back then they had pro bono counsel who would provide opinions and clear works prior to publication. Does standardebooks.org not have the same?
- AdmiralAsshat 7y ago
  Project is too small, from my understanding (I'm only a contributor, not a core team member). You can see from the contribution guidelines[0]: Ebooks that are not clearly in the U.S. public domain. If it’s not on Gutenberg, we’ll probably decline it. So we're basically piggybacking off of the copyright verification work we assume that PG has already done. This is one of the reasons I haven't started The Worm Ourboros yet--it's in Australia's Gutenberg archive, but not the US one. [0]https://standardebooks.org/contribute/accepted-ebooks https://standardebooks.org/contribute/accepted-ebooks

flycaliguy 7y ago

Can anybody tell me if the same laws cover illustrations in old books that cover the words?

jandrese 7y ago
As far as I know the copyright terms for illustrations are the same as the ones for the written word. However, you could theoretically have a situation where the artist renewed the copyright on the images but the author did not renew the copyright on the words, or vice versa.

blatherard 7y ago

The important point in this article is that the NYPL just recently digitized the relevant records, thereby making it possible to determine whether a copyright was renewed. The old rule of thumb (anything after 1923 is presumptively protected) was used because looking for the absence of a renewal in a multi-decade span of printed records just wasn't feasible. The linked post in the article is very detailed and has more background: https://www.nypl.org/blog/2019/05/31/us-copyright-history-1923-1964 https://www.nypl.org/blog/2019/05/31/us-copyright-history-19...

edgarvaldes 7y ago

I would love to have all the winners of the Hugo Awards(the first were given in 1953)

jandrese 7y ago

I wish we would bring back manual renewals for copyright. I get that publishers thought it was a hassle to have to do the work for stuff they had not published in decades and had no intention of ever reprinting, but that's kind of the point isn't it? Why is the government locking away works that the original rightsholders no longer care about? The copyright system is supposed to serve the common good, what common good is there from locking away works simply because the original owner lost interest in them? Or worse, when nobody knows who or where the original owner is.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
kbutler 7y ago
Grant short-term copyright for any written works, but require registration and periodic renewal for longer duration, with increasing fees for subsequent renewals.
- TomMarius 7y ago
  I would be in favor of continuously increasing percentage of revenue based tax, not some arbitrary fee.
  - jandrese 7y ago
    That's kind of hard to measure though. It would require a LOT of government auditing to catch cheaters. Like Hollywood movies would never have to pay to be renewed because they never make any net revenue.
riffic 7y ago
https://www.wikihow.com/Write-Your-Congressional-Representative https://www.wikihow.com/Write-Your-Congressional-Representat...
pavon 7y ago
I'm not a big fan of copyright renewals. There are two arguments I here in favor of them. 1) It allows orphaned works to enter the public domain sooner. 2) For works that are renewed, it provides information on who the copyright holder is and how they can be contacted. On the first point, I think that renewal is a poor proxy for determining which works are are orphaned or no longer have commercial value, instead just showing which copyright holders have the most diligent book keeping. Large number of published works will loose copyright protection just due to oversight. A simple mistake shouldn't result in disproportionate consequences (loss of decades of revenue). At the same time other works that are no longer available on the market will be prevented from entering public domain by companies that just renew everything. Furthermore, historically, the USPTO has done a poor job of keeping (and making accessible) records of which works were renewed, and which weren't. Anyone who wants to use an orphaned work has needed to prove a negative, which is difficult to do, so most assume that everything is still copyrighted to avoid liability anyway. Lastly, just because someone has registered a work (for renewal or otherwise) is not proof that they hold copyright on that work. People have spent decades trying to determine the rightful owner of a work so they can license it, even when it was registered. Instead, I think what we need is a process for the USPTO to grant third parties permission to use a work when a good faith effort has been made to determine and contact the copyright holder. In my view, this would involve involve paying of statutory license fees to the USPTO who will hold them in escrow. If the owner is eventually determined, they can claim the money, and if no one claims it after some time it goes to fund the endowment for the arts. This would allow the public access to orphaned and disputed works again, and would encourage registration without the strong consequences for forgetting. I would actually take this a step further and declare that all works are subject to statutory licensing for the second half of their copyright duration, not just orphaned works, and the above process would just be a fallback when the copyright holder can't be contacted. And of course, would shorten the copyright duration as well.

tzs 7y ago

Here is a very nice table listing pretty much every case under US copyright law [1]. For books first published in the US, here is what is now in the public domain. • Books published before 1924. • Books published from 1924 through 1977 without a copyright notice. • Books published from 1978 to early 1989 without a copyright notice and without a subsequent registration within 5 years. • Books published from 1924 through 1963 with copyright notice but whose copyright was not renewed. (This is the case for the books the article is talking about). • Books prepared by an officer or employee of the US government as part of the person's official duties. [1] https://copyright.cornell.edu/publicdomain https://copyright.cornell.edu/publicdomain

thepete2 7y ago

Why is there no netflix for books? Google already scanned most of the world's books. The only thing that would be scary is someone knowing what books I read when and where. (my usual privacy concerns ...)

Bluecobra 7y ago
There already is. Amazon has had Kindle Unlimited ($9.99/month) for quite some time for now.
- coldtea 7y ago
  And of course there's O'Reilly's Safari subscription for programming/tech books...
slg 7y ago
There is. It is called the library. My local library has plenty of ebooks and audio books that I can borrow through both their website and their partners' websites like overdrive.com. And it doesn't even even cost you a monthly fee because it is already paid for by your tax dollars whether you use it or not.
- readams 7y ago
  Though there are often long lines to wait for many books, because the licensing model is dumb.
teddyh 7y ago
A Netflix for books, you say? http://www.johnnywander.com/comic/a-netflix-for-books http://www.johnnywander.com/comic/a-netflix-for-books
shmerl 7y ago
Archive.org has digital borrowing concept. I don't like digital renting though. If you are paying, better just to buy DRM-free and keep your copy.
7y ago

acabal 7y ago

This is really awesome and I wasn't aware of it! For a lot of the pulp sci fi stuff on Project Gutenberg, it was just a handful of volunteers doing the copyright research and I think it was a big bottleneck. I remember thinking of getting involved in that research but it was far too complicated and time consuming. Making it machine-readable is a huge step to opening up the public domain!

shmerl 7y ago

> This is how Project Gutenberg is able to publish all these science fiction stories from the 50s and 60s. Interesting. I was wondering how Project Gutenberg put Robert Sheckley's stories on-line (and why only some and not all of them): https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/2960 https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/2960 It also highlights again, how crazy copyright term has become, and that it needs a serious rollback to sane levels.

sehugg 7y ago

Lots of TV shows before 1970 weren't renewed or had copyright notice errors, making them PD -- many of them on archive.org: https://infogalactic.com/info/List_of_TV_series_with_episodes_in_the_public_domain https://infogalactic.com/info/List_of_TV_series_with_episode...

tyingq 7y ago

This affects earlier versions of the Alcoholics Anonymous "Big Book", and I'd heard it was a sore point for them. http://silkworth.net/gsowatch/1939/uslaw.htm http://silkworth.net/gsowatch/1939/uslaw.htm

dfc 7y ago

> This only represents 10% of the 80%, but it's the ten percent most likely to be interesting, Does anyone have any insight into why the chosen 10% is the most likely to be interesting?